In May 2005, the YouTube founders launched YouTube.com, providing people with a platform to broadcast themselves to the world. Six years on, the world is watching and we wanted to say thank you to the YouTube community for a couple of amazing birthday presents.

You could drive non-stop across the country from our office in San Bruno, Calif. to New York City

You could undertake a massive movie marathon by watching the entire Back to the Future trilogy eight and a half times (we’d recommend you do that at YouTube Movies)

An ambitious cheetah (the fastest land animal at an average running speed of 75 mph) starting in South Africa could traverse 3600 miles of the African continent and reach Egypt

The other great birthday present? Your views. We’re amazed that over this last weekend, you drove YouTube past the 3 billion views a day mark, a 50% increase over last year. That’s the equivalent of nearly half the world’s population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day.

The first six years of a person’s life are incredibly important for development. The same could be said for a company. For the last six years we’ve grown and evolved in our quest to push video forward and deliver the best possible experience to you. So when will we reach 72 hours a minute, or 4 billion views a day? That’s up to you. For our part, we'll continue to work at delivering the diversity and quality of content you're asking for, from live streams of music festivals to campaigns around social inspiration and change, rockstars in education to citizen-journalist coverage of global events and YOU showcasing your own talent. You’ve made YouTube successful because it’s a reflection of you and your world. If this is what we’ve accomplished together in six years, we can only imagine where you’ll take us in the next six!